Setting up your CentOS 6.4 to your VirtualBox

So I wanted to take note of my setup in CentOS version 6.4 from the minimal installation, i.e. no X11 and other useful utilities like make, kernel-devel, ... to a desired Desktop use with X11 and those utilities.

I downloaded the VM setup here thru, http://virtualboxes.org/images/centos/

then I downloaded CentOS 6.0 base x86_64 or you can go directly thru here http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualboximage/?source=dlp

Now, this is very minimal setup or installation, so we need to install the other packages. By default, the username/password is "root/reverse".

First I update the yum,


yum update
yum -y install gcc make kernel-devel kernel-headers wget

Then I also install rpmforgge to install DKMS to simplify the upgrades. This is noted from this link, http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Virtualization/VirtualBox/CentOSguest.

yum --enablerepo rpmforge install dkms
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm 
rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm 

You can install htop too just to make it a test if rpmforge works,

yum install htop

If DKMS is not used the Guest Additions will need to be reinstalled after every kernel update.

If the development environment and kernel source are not already installed:

yum groupinstall "Development Tools" // other packages are already installed from first `yum install` call above

yum install kernel-devel // though you can skip this as we have installed it above.

Then after these, since we installed the other development tool packages that we have on the first yum install above, then I just install the X11 window system.

yum -y groupinstall "X Window System" "Desktop" "Fonts" "General Purpose Desktop"

X11 is important because installing guest additions requires X11. After you have install this, just reboot, but make sure you have edited first your /etc/inittab and use "5" instead of "5" for the selected runlevel.

Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions

In this section, I presume you have reboot your machine. Now to install guest additions, be sure that the guest additions by Virtualbox is mounted to your CDROM.

Else you can just mount by,

mount -t auto /dev/cdrom1 /mnt

or /mnt as your desired path or wherever you wanted to access.

Once you have it, just run 

/mnt/VBOXADDITIONS_x.x.xx_xxxxx/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run 

if your device media has been mounted to /mnt, or it might be in /media by default if it was loaded successfully.

Anyhow, that's all that are mostly covered.

If you have problems with your keyboard, you can also set this with,

$> system-config-keyboard

which will ask for your admin password and then just select the right keyboard layout. Please note that, this has a bug, I believe, which will corrupt your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. I suggest you first backup your /etc/X11/xorg.conf before running system-config-keyboard or else you'll got this problem below,

In Xorg.0.log:

Parse error on line 6 of section ServerLayout in file /etc/X11/xorg.conf
This section must have an Identifier line.
(EE) Problem parsing the config file
(EE) Error parsing the config file

error:
no screens found

You can take a look at this bug posted in redhat.com, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638809.

In my end, you can just comment the Screen or added "Identifier". See below,

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "Main Layout"
#       Screen         "Screen[0]" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Other external links that might also help for some info might be:

• https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=42825

Hope this helps.